“Les Diabolique” and Transgression

Last updated on: October 14, 2026 at 11:59 am by Zachary Miller

“Les Diabolique” and Transgression 2026-10-14T11:59:04-06:00 Zachary Miller

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Alongside something like Arrival, Vertigo, or Charade, Les Diaboliques is a very twisty movie. I would strongly recommend checking it out first and just letting yourself be surprised before you get too far into this thing.

For the rest of us … a quick recap of Henri-Georges Clouzot’ Les Diaboliques.

The film sees a teacher at a French boarding school, Christina, who is withering under the abuses of her husband, Michel the headmaster–including his affair with another one of the teachers, Nicole, whom he also abuses. Tired from his mistreatment, Nicole convinces Christina to assist her in murdering Michel, freeing them both from his domination. Christina goes along with this, and the plan is carried out.

But after they drown him in the bathtub, mysterious things follow the both of them. The body that they dumped in the school swimming pool never surfaces. Moreover, the boys at the school will swear they can see him moving in the shadows at times. Did they even kill him? And if not, where is he? And how long does he plan on menacing them like this?

The terrors mount until Christina finds herself stalked by a sinister figure in the house. She retreats into the bathroom, where she finds Michel’s body as it starts to rise. The fright gives her a heart attack, and she dies. The truth then comes out–Nicole and Michel were in on this from the start, and they plotted together to aggravate Christina’s heart condition to trigger such a heart attack so they could inherit her money and remove her from the situation. It all would have worked if Christina hadn’t confessed their wrongdoing to the private detective, who overhears Nicole and Michel’s little victory dance and takes them away.

At the center of this film is a woman who is persuaded into unrighteous action only to be haunted by this decision for the rest of her short little life. In this way, the film has a lot in common with Psycho and its study of the corroding nature of guilt. Even though we believe for most of the film that she has killed a person, you wind up feeling very sorry for Christina for a number of reasons.

It is well-established, for example, that Michel was an awful human being. Michel was degrading to the both of them and abusive to Christina. And frankly he also sucks as a headmaster, letting his kids starve because he doesn’t want to pay for proper food. The subject of divorce is teased for Christina, but the strictures of her society also penalize her and make a proper breakaway difficult for her. In a lot of ways, it really was simpler just to kill him.

But it was a choice with dire consequences. Christina will spend the remainder of the film, the remainder of her life, in a state of paranoia. The psychological torture Christina endures is a deliberate machination of ill-intended parties. It is also a natural consequence to Christina acting so against her nature and subjecting herself to evil.

A lot about this situation is very unfair. Christina wasn’t trying to darken her soul. She just wanted her abusive husband to go away. But the ghosts swarm over her in her transgression nonetheless.

There is something very true to life about that, even in its direness. It only took one affair with Bathsheba for David to face serious spiritual consequences. Christina only had to kill one husband before she was overtaken by ghosts. Whatever we might decide about Christina’s situation, we can also perhaps decide that anytime we are lured by the thought of transgression, we also do so under the belief that we really had no other choice–even if our situation looks nothing like Christina’s.

So the film winds up turning the knife back onto Christina in rebuke for her transgression. But neither Nicole nor Michel get to be agents of morality here. They are also caught in their crimes, which are even steeper. If we are in the business of ranking sins, then I’d be content to label Nicole and Michel’s sins as worse. There was deception as well intent to kill a weaker party. Nicole pretended to be an ally to a vulnerable woman with the intent to have her killed in a particularly torturing way.

There is also a case to be made for Christina alleviating her sins by confessing to Alfred. This doesn’t normally resolve much where murder is concerned. But as we later find out, Christina didn’t technically murder anyone. Maybe that’ll afford her some grace at the judgment bar.

Most of us won’t be that lucky, though. Best to abstain from drowning our tormentors in the bathtub just to be on the safe side.

General Christian

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